The Second Life event will celebrate the launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The event will bring together IT Pros and Developers to get an in-depth, up-close look at the new products and will give attendees an opportunity to meet with their peers as well as Microsoft employees. Learn more about features and solutions of all three new products in a classroom environment. These classes are meant to give you a high level technical overview. Join us for this day long...

Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" April 2008 CTP is now available here . The download is a VPC image that previews the next major release of Visual Studio Team System. The VPC includes a number of samples and walkthroughs to demonstrate some of the new features. Notable ones include:
Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger
Identify the test impact of code changes
Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger
Using Data Generation to custom-build...

Have you wanted a great font that is really visible, yet monospaced so it is to work with in Visual Studio? Well, we've added Microsoft Consolas Font Family to the mix. I downloaded and installed it from Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 . It installs itself into your system and makes itself the default font in Visual Studio. The Microsoft Consolas Font Family is a set of highly legible fonts designed for ClearType. It is intended for use in programming environments and...

Live Mesh technical preview has been announced and is offered by invitation only to participants in the US. The preview is designed to provide feedback about the platform. To learn more about Live Mesh and sign up for the wait list, visit www.mesh.com . There's a Live Mesh preview screencast for developers .
That said, there's a lot to pay attention to with Live Mesh as a development platform.
Live Mesh provides a seamless platform for you to build applications that integrate rich content,...

If you'd like to get some free SQL 2008 training and are based near our Redmond, Washington headquarters, you have a great opportunity to do so. Just follow the instructions below...
Hope to see you there!
jmp
OVERVIEW:
Business Intelligence Development with SQL Server 2008
The Microsoft Business Intelligence platform offers an unparalleled end to end environment for developing BI solutions. This two day class will provide you with the confidence to tackle a BI project and the skills...

The final release of the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack is now available for download. This release provides several exciting features for C++ developers, such as a major update to MFC and an implementation of TR1. These features are fully covered under Microsoft’s standard support policies.
The Feature Pack is available free of charge to any Visual Studio 2008 Standard or above customer. The download can be found at Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack Release .
Using the included MFC components, developers...

Why software factories? This is a question that I frequently get asked when introducing the Software Factories paradigm. While it seems obvious that increased reuse, higher level of abstraction, and increased automation provide advantages to today's text-based software-development efforts, it is not enough to justify the necessary upfront investment to upper management and other stakeholders. Therefore, we started to look for quantitative data that would clearly show the business case for using this...

There are some great enhancements coming to .NET 3.5 with the SP1 release scheduled for later this year. If you'd like to get started with these new enhancements early, and want some great training on them this is the way to do it. All you need to do is download the kit from here: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=8719735
For more information check out Jonathan Carter's blog post on the Training Kit.

Service Pack 3 has shipped to manufacturing for Microsoft Windows XP. Bits will be available for download and through Windows Update on April 29.
Users will be able to update Windows XP to SP3 at that time, but you will have to select the optional download in Windows Update or download a larger, stand-alone installer from the downloads site. Users won't be automatically updated early summer,
For more infomration, see Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) Released to Manufacturing on TechNet.

Microsoft released more open protocol specifications this week ( http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/apr08/04-08ProtocolPR.mspx ). We’re talking 14,000 more pages of documentation involving Office client and server products (including SharePoint technologies and Office Communications Server) and Exchange. That brings the total protocol documentation under this program up to more than 44,000 pages.
If you do low-level work involving SharePoint, Office, Exchange, Outlook, OCS, etc....

Ever wonder what the new syntax is in C#? Or how you might go about learning what is new in the .NET language?
Stuart Celarier of CheckFree and I explore the new languages features in C# in a series of screencasts. It's a whirlwind tour of the important language features since C# 1. Stuart describes the feature and why it is useful. But doesn't get into best practices nor suggested usages. Just the facts about the feature.
Whirlwinds are bite-sized webcasts, usually is shorter than 15 minutes...

Today I published another new screencast for Office developers. This somewhat brief (14 minute) screencast will introduce you to the recently released VSTO Power Tools. These tools will help you build Office application quicker and provide some great little utilities as well. If you are developing Office applications this is a must watch video, and the Power Tools are a must have ! Here's my current VSTO related screencast's: Using Office 2007 Icons in Your Office 2007 Add-ins Adding Controls to...

Windows Mobile 6.1 announced
Announcements made at CTIA Wireless 2008 this week point to improving smartphones for your users for both Windows Mobile 6.1 and Internet Explorer Mobile. Partners from around the globe are committed to updating or expanding their portfolios to Windows Mobile 6.1 beginning in the second quarter of 2008.
Windows Mobile 6.1
Microsoft announced Windows Mobile 6.1, an update for its Windows Mobile software that includes new time-saving features, easier phone navigation...

You can build SharePoint Web Parts to take advantage of Silverlight user interface components. You can find out how in the Silverlight Blueprint. The Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint is source code and guidance for developers describing how to use Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft SharePoint in your applications and Internet Web sites. SharePoint applications that use Web Parts can now be built using Silverlight user interface elements. This capability enables a fresh look at data exposed through...

RoboChamps is a simulated robotics league that is open to academics, hobbyists, and developers from around the world. RoboChamps demonstrates the power of the Microsoft platform to enable a broad range of developers to explore new ways to use .NET for robotics programming. RoboChamps is built on top of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (MSRDS) 2008 CTP , and uses that product’s robust, physics-enabled simulation environment to remove the barriers of entry that exist for many today. This simulated...

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We delivered our 1 st in-person Dynamics Discovery Day event at Mountain View, CA on Thu 4/3. These in-person events are part of 2 nd wave ( 1 st wave was via web) to educate ISV community on platform aspects of Dynamics. We started with nice lunch, followed by three focused Dynamics sessions covering ERP and CRM in detail and ended with nice cocktail networking session. See here for more detail for upcoming events. See you there!!
Sanjay Jain
Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect...

I've been talking more and more with ISVs and developers who are interested in using Office as a UI platform. And now that Visual Studio 2008 comes with Visual Studio Tools for Office installed, developing Office Business Applications (OBAs) are much easier.
One aspect of using Microsoft Office as a platform is the idea of document interchange. You can use Office Open XML as a standards-based document format. Yesterday, the Office Open XML file format received the necessary number of votes for...

Live Mesh is an implementation of Microsoft’s Software+ Services strategy.
Software+Service mean that you can leverage the new world of cloud computing and compliment your application software that runs on PC or any device to provide a better solution, rich experience to your users.
There are various reasons for this to be the right approach when compared to moving everything to cloud or software as a Service model.
A) The browser is still unable to provide rich user experiences, so consuming...

Today we announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, an on-demand customer relationship management service hosted and managed by Microsoft. The new Internet service delivers a full suite of marketing, sales and service capabilities through a Web browser or directly into Microsoft Office and Outlook. See here for more...
Sanjay Jain
Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Blogs : Team’s Blog + Sanjay’s Blog

I mentioned in a previous post that I would post again when I updated my screencast series on Workflow Foundation. Today I submitted the third (and probably final) screencast in this series titled Service Enabling Workflows . Many don't realize that the Workflow Foundation provides an interface-driven service layer to the workflows and activities that run within it. This service layer enables SOA architectures within workflows and allows activities to communicate with the host, the operating environment...

If you're looking to get you started on developing RIAs with the Silverlight 2 stack, you should check out Bob Familiar's series of articles on topic.
Bob makes use of SL 2 XAML, WCF, controls, templates, data binding, and (yes) deep zoom in his sample, all in a lucid, approchable way.
Bob also walks you through some of his musical experiments (which are way better than my musical experiements, which usually explode on contact with the Internet.)
Please let us know how you like Bob's Sliverlight...

With the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008, a refresh of BizTalk 2006 will be released to support SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, and the .NET Framework 3.5. This is not a new release of BizTalk Server per se ... it will be built on the existing released bits. This is to ensure compatibility to existing BizTalk applications.
There are some planned enhancements based on customer requests. These include:
New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI (Universal Description...

I know of a few ISVs who work with robotics and are fasinated by the toolkits that are coming. So I wanted to be sure to let you know that the first community technology preview (CTP) of Robotics Developer Studio 2008 has been released. This is the third version of the robotics programming platform, previously called Microsoft Robotics Studio .
The newer version including increased runtime performance, improved security management, support for distributed language integrated queries (LINQ), support...

It was great to see many of you last week in Atlantic City, attending Microsoft Health & Life Sciences Developer and Solutions Conference 2008 and thank you for joining me in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Platform session.
· Derek Pollock from Proscape and Lars Vida from Brimstone shared their CRM 4.0 based Life-Science industry vertical solutions ( Closed Loop Marketing from Proscape and Enterprise CRM from Brimstone ).
· Sharon Linsenbach , staff writer from eWEEK/Channel Insider/Ziff...